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User blog:LociOiling/Dusting off the Foldit wiki...
It's been over three years since Marie Suchard made the last blog post. In her farewell post, Marie noted: : The wiki is not well organized. In many pages, there is a mix of description of the game, strategy, scientific information and general thought on the game. Not a lot has changed since then. Paul Dunn has tirelessly continued to update the puzzle results. I've made some updates, such as updating the list of Foldit Lua Functions. Bruno Kestemont, Susume, and a few anonymous folk have also contributed. (My apologies to anyone I've overlooked.) I see that Marie may even be with us in spirit, as a certain "Msuchard" removed some malicious links from the "101 - Cookbook" page as recently as 30 December 2016. The first few days of 2017 had been a litle slow for me (bad weather, bad cold), which has given me time for a little more wiki work. This has led to some new content, and a few tweaks here and there. Here are a few of the highlights. We had an excellent chat over in #veteran about Jpred, which led to a new Secondary structure prediction tools page, which includes a chat transcript. Susume had some excellent thoughts on why Jpred and the like don't do very well at times.(I had to install Python to run the irclog2html utility, but now I can format chat logs like a pro.) By popular request (meaning at least one person asked), I took on the Little Square Boxes (or "LSB") that show up in many Foldit recipes. I'd already figured out how to get rid of them in my dinosaur era "vim" editor, but to my surprise, I found a better way. I also worked out the settings needed for Notepad++ and SciTE. I started an article on the concept of "Ideal Loops", which describes the Rama map, the Blueprint tool, the new Remix interface. This one's still a work in progress, but it's already spun off a companion piece on "ABEGO Coloring". It clarifies what the letters in "ABEGO" mean. I found out that the "O" in "ABEGO" doesn't even have a color, and finally realized that the "ABEGOColor" View option gives all segments an ABEGO (or really an "ABEG") color, even if the segment is in a white area of the Rama map. A chance visit to the Disulfide Bridge page (literally chance, I clicked on "Random page"), led to this description of a 2008 visit to the Foldit lab, which included this: : Foldit needs more players. RIght now, there are only about 200 active players; about 40 people are playing at any given time. Beginners try but often get discouraged. Once again, these words still ring true. I'm guessing at the 2008 date for the visit, but the reference to "Wiggly Splines", which contained a broken link, led me to this 2008 Pixar paper. It contains this: : The continuous differential equation that results from equation 2 is stable for all positive values of k and γ. Unfortunately, once finite differences are substituted for continuous derivatives, stability is no longer guaranteed. In the same vein, the article also states: : If a character’s belly appears momentarily in profile, its jiggle may be excessively evident and need to be toned down. If an emotional moment demands stillness, the jiggle must come to a stop. Truly, the jiggle must stop. I hope this quick journey down the wiki rabbit hole can serve as inspiration. I'll try to keep up with the wiki updates, but my pace is likely to slow in the upcoming weeks. Please let me know if you see any errors or omissions on wiki. Better yet, make your own contributions. Please consider registering with the wikia site (or "Fandom" as they're now calling it) using something like your Foldit screen name. (Most of those "anonymous" posts are just fine, but it's nice to see who's who.) LociOiling (talk) 21:36, January 11, 2017 (UTC) Category:Blog posts